To address the shortage of frequency capacity, which is caused by the tendency of high capacity and high-speed communication in a cellular mobile communication system, a method of additionally installing a small cell in an existing macro cell coverage has been discussed.
In this instance, to minimize the effect of interference to an existing system that mainly uses a macro cell, a separate frequency band scheme may be used, in which a macro cell base station (BS) may use, for example, a frequency of 2 GHz which is a relatively lower band, and a small cell BS may use, for example, a frequency of 3.5 GHz which is a relatively higher band. In the separate frequency band scheme, high band frequency resources may include a larger number of dormant frequency resources than low band frequency resources. Therefore, the separate frequency band scheme is advantageous in that the system capacity may be dramatically improved by utilizing carrier aggregation (CA) technology that uses multiple component carriers. For reference, the CA technology, which is introduced by 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) Release 10, is to increase a transmission speed by simultaneously utilizing a plurality of carriers.
Other aspects, advantages, and salient features of the disclosure will become apparent to those skilled in the art from the following detailed description, which, taken in conjunction with the annexed drawings, discloses various embodiments of the present disclosure.